Agent Smith posted a while back about the monument outlets inside and outside the great room and what a mess they were. Three of the ones in the great room were missing covers and at least one had had a fire within it. When we had the main electrical panel redone we had the electricians decommission them to just kill that risk factor right off.
Since a few outlets were missing covers, they looked pretty awful, but getting new covers for them was not exactly cost-effective–new SteelCity/Thomas & Betts brass floor monument covers for plug, lamp or outlet costs between $100 and $250 from Graybar. That would have been anywhere from $300 to $750 to provide a primarily cosmetic fix for the great room. So I started scouring eBay regularly in hopes some cheaper options might turn up, and we got super lucky after about a month and found someone selling the lamp covers for just $14 a pop. Bonus: they appeared to be new old stock and a bit tarnished. I bought three and once they arrived we were delighted–they fit in perfectly with the existing covers we didn’t have to replace, and the screws were perfectly tarnished.
It worked out so well, when writing this post I popped over to eBay to see if the guy who was selling the covers still had any in stock and he does; according to the eBay listing he’s only made that one sale of three to us. Since we’re so happy with the result, we just picked up two more to replace the two we didn’t touch back in January/February when this mini-project occurred.
Since this project happened in January/February and this post was written in June to be published in July, we are facing a bit of a backlog on getting project stories out there. This is due to one part procrastination, one part digital assets management tool migration issues, and one part general insanity of life at Purgatory. The good news, though, is now that the wall saga is put to bed, there are no more giant story arcs to cover and most projects can be covered in just one–or in cases like the pool remodel–a handful of posts.
Then there are the dozen or so posts that were started and then abandoned, and since I’ve digressed from the topic already, I will include the snippet of one here. I forget why exactly this was written, but it does sum up how very different life halfway up a mountain is from living in a city or even the actual suburbs.
We moved to Purgatory from San Francisco, where we spent over 7 years in a nice enough house on Potrero Hill. The house had one proper bedroom, two office-sized rooms, a four-car garage and a back garden about twice as big as the normal SF backyard. The Purgatory house is a bit bigger, and as for the backyard–we don’t really have one as there is no “back” to our house. For a size comparison, the fact that our old backyard would fit in the swimming pool pretty much says it all. (Another scale comparison: it is a longer walk from my office to our wine closet than it was from my old office to the corner liquor store.)
There are definite advantages to the additional space: we finally have a proper guest room and guest bathroom (guests no longer have to sleep on an inflatable mattress in the living room or dining room); the boys have their own space just outside my office (which helps minimize the amount of dust and random bits of food that end up in my workspace); the giant garage has become a hub for LeMons car activities; there is the abundance of wildlife; the pool, hot tub, potential garden and orchard space; our own hiking area; and the ability to just pop outside and fly a small RC plane about, practicing some aerobatics without worrying about damaging property. And there are the views–there is something wonderful to see from every window of the house.
Perhaps the one facet that was not a selling point to us was the view, yet now it’s something we really enjoy and value. We did not set out searching for properties with 270+ degree views of Silicon Valley–we intended to buy a very large garage and pool with an attached house that didn’t need to be set on fire and rebuilt. When after close to 2 years of looking we found this place, it ticked the right boxes and the view was an afterthought. Now, almost 2 years after moving in, the fact that every window presents us with a different view–whether it’s the wildlife outside my office, the valley floor and downtown San Jose or the surrounding homes on the hillsides (and occasional fires)–is a fairly awesome thing.